The Roads Campaign. This boils down to the assumption that paved roads equal improved security. In most of these posts, I make it a point to state that roads, even improved but still unpaved roads, have enormous value outside of security. But the idea of selling road construction as a security strategy simply stretches credibility.

• But I Thought Roads Helped Security?
• Thinking Critically About Road Construction
• Roads, Roads, Roads
• Of PR Campaigns and the Utility of Area Knowledge
• A Practical Look at the Value of Roads
• Learning from PRTs
• The Strange Benefits of Paving Afghanistan
• Ann Marlowe Thinks Afghanistan Is Doing Awesome

Propagandistic reporting. Several journalists have written what can only be called propaganda for the ways they portray events and long-term trends in Afghanistan. These pieces are noteworthy for the one-sided repetition of military or state department official statements, and the lack of critical analysis or even contrasting opinion. In some cases specific companies or organizations and their employees were specifically called out, yet were not given a chance to respond. This is the most insipid type of reporting, for it masquerades as honest.

• The Power of Propaganda in the Hands of Hacks
• At Least It Was a Two-fer
• War Is Peace, and Other Orwells at the Journal
• Of PR Campaigns and the Utility of Area Knowledge
• Ann Marlowe Thinks Afghanistan Is Doing Awesome
• Is the Human Terrain System Worth Its Spit?

Lazy scholarship. Several scholars of Afghanistan have written simply appalling articles recently on Afghanistan, and in particular matters relating to the Pashtuns. This is a difficult theme to track, because the field is rather large, and deconstructing questionable arguments is difficult and time consuming. But it is growing in importance as opportunistic people try to make their names on the backs of Afghans.

• The Inexplicable Longevity of Selig S. Harrison
• Who Needs Thomas Barnett’s Discarded Theories?
• Digging Deeper into the Pashtun Tribal Areas

While news reports like to speak of a “resurgent Taliban” in Afghanistan, in the 14 provinces that make up Regional Command East in Afghanistan they are a defeated military force. Not only do the Taliban refuse to engage American forces directly, they have not won an engagement with the Afghan National Army in a year. Even the unimpressive Afghan National Police have lately been winning battles with the insurgents.

That’s funny, I was under the impression—say, from actual incident reports—that the number of security incidents in the region was way up this year.

Let’s dig into this hackery further.

Marlowe commits her first sin by thinking that because the Taliban no longer engage in open battle on the Shomali plains that they are defeated. This is the same mistake the U.S. made in Iraq (and, umm, Afghanistan)—an insurgency becomes more dangerous when it doesn’t fight openly. In fact, the number of IEDs and VBIEDs she writes off has risen in 2007 and 2008, bring record casualties, both civilian and Coalition. That is not the behavior of a defeated force, but rather one made stronger through the adoption of asymmetric methods.

Marlowe profiles Col. Marty Schweitzer, and quite glowingly. This is highly ironic for her: while heralding all the success he’s achieved in the provinces under his command, she neglects to mention on critical piece: the Human Terrain System. During his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Schweitzer said that the HTT team assigned to the 4th Brigade Combat Team headquartered at FOB Salerno, where Marlowe did her last embed, “reduced our kinetic operations, assisted in developing more effective non-kinetic courses of action, improved the unit’s overall situational awareness, improved consequence management, increased host nation government support, improved the Brigade’s humanitarian assistance efforts, improved village assessments, improved information operations capabilities, decreased enemy forces attacks, and decreased ordinary crime in our area of operations.”

Tall praise for a program Marlowe once wrote off as “buying into the ‘cultural knowledge’ critique [of counterinsurgency], and… a dubious version at that.” But now that the “right” people are singing its praises? Well she’s all sunshine and gum drops.

Talk about a hack. She can’t even get her own story straight.

This problem continues into the rest of her laborious, 5,500-word extravaganza. Much like a tired old Kaplan book, all the soldiers are brilliant, innovative, and “soft-spoked but iron-willed,” while those Pashtuns are rewarded for their good behavior like dogs even while they live in archaic, backwoods hovels that leave all the little children—who never, horror of horrors, learned to play catch—covered with dirt. Marlowe likes to brag to her critics about how much time she’s spent there, among the people and the troops. She’s even gone so far as to brag of her linguistic skills and superior cultural knowledge to actual working translators, while running around a FOB in Afghanistan wearing a tank top. But here, she writes as if she’s never before seen the place, as if she were David Ignatius comparing our noble troops to British imperialists in a Rudyard Kipling novel. Which could maybe explain the inexplicable line about families of midget policemen. (I’m serious.)

Anyone with access to Google images can confirm all of these descriptions Marlowe writes. Why the relentless exoticism, the hagiography built around our troops? In a word: this is propaganda. That is why she writes doozies like “the Army, typically, is more than willing to admit its mistakes,” or that “the tally of slain police officers” is a good tally of how well things are going.

She also drops in the standard line about the road construction. Only this time, she reserves nothing but praise for the military’s construction efforts, while offering nothing but scorn for the USAID contractors. Unlike her more skillful dupes in the media, however, Marlowe doesn’t actually make any claim about the roads. They “help” connect those “fiercely independent, isolationist Pashtuns” to the government in some way, but all she does is list the miles paved using CERP funds, as if that matters to the objective of connecting people to their government or doing anything useful at all.

And even here there is a curious battle at play. While I’m all about complaining about USAID’s contracting hassles—they are legion, and pale in comparison to the enormous handfuls of money unaccountably thrown at even the smallest military unit—she seems to miss the biggest problem. In a previous discussion on the benefits of roads, Harry Rud, who currently works for an NGO in Ghor province west of Kabul, offered this insight:

I’m still not entirely convinced that the benefits a road would bring to the people of Ghor would significantly reduce poverty and inequality, or that there wouldn’t be better ways of spending the huge amount of money it would cost to build a half-way decent and useful road.

I’ve heard tales of other road-building projects that have cost millions of dollars for just a few thousand meters, and have then been washed away over the winter. And other roads, while of some small benefit to locally hired Afghan labourers, that have been sub-contracted out, and sub-contracted out, and sub-contracted out again - each contracting company creaming off ‘a bit’ for themselves.

He and I disagree over the relative economic value of roads, but the key here is what happens to them once they’re built. One of the interesting things Joel Hafvenstein noted in his memoir of Helmand province is that the roads were so poorly maintained, the off-road tracks wound up being better routes over which to drive. Similarly, nearly everyone is in agreement that roads in Afghanistan are simply heinously expensive to build, and in some areas an over-focus on them may redirect funding from other, more immediately useful projects like poverty relief (which matters when basic commodities like food are eating nearly 60% of an average person’s income). Especially since roads made concentrated targets for IED and VBIED incidents, and since those incidents have resulted in India pulling all of its workers out of the country after the latest in a series of killings of its road workers. The military and the governor all want asphalt; USAID wants gravel. Marlowe mocks USAID for their foolishness. I wonder: how often does asphalt wash away? Is the higher erosion of gravel a better trade-off for the improved ease of repair and maintenance? These are the complexities of road construction in Afghanistan that the propagandists being led around by the nose on their military adventure tours don’t bother to explore.

But what is even greater here is a single line snuggled into the top half of a paragraph 3/4 through the essay: “There aren’t IED attacks there [in Spera], though there also aren’t any roads to speak of in the mountain fastness.” Ignoring the annoying use of Kipling terms (can any journalist write about Afghanistan without the lazy use of clichés?), Marlowe seems to think there is a connection between roads and IEDs. There once was a time when she not only proclaimed that roads solve IEDs, she took to the comments section here at Registan.net to angrily shout her case.

Hack, indeed. Make up your mind, Marlowe.

Alas. The news in Khost is so good—they’re building a commercial airport, industrial park, big new power plants, some bank branches, and dozens of schools—you’d be forgiven for even wondering why we’re still needed there. After all, the sub-governor of Mandozai district, Haji Doulat, doesn’t take bribes because his family members run “a successful contracting business” that isn’t at all connected with those damned USAID contractors! And even though the troops there have to “massage Doulat’s not inconsiderable ego” and “reward him for his competence and honesty,” that isn’t at all like taking bribes from the good guys. No sir, it’s not corruption when we pay politicians for behavior we find acceptable—it’s only corruption when the bad guys do that. Does he also do tricks for money and construction projects?

See, the problem with this is that Marlowe is committing the cardinal sin of amateur Afghan studies: over-generalization. She is taking success in a single province—despite the continuing violence, Khost is a relative success—and pulling from that her story about the rest of the country. Though she claims to limit the story she tells to this one province, and only provides vignettes from it, her very first paragraph pulled it out to the entire regional command. The men she interviewed know better: Schweitzer says you “have to assess security village by village.” He was speaking in the context of her section on how great Khost was secured: with less than 200 paratroopers, her favorite Army unit only saw 27 police officers killed in multiple bomb explosions. Even though most of these were concentrated in Sabari, the problem, according to a Captain she talked to, is just that there isn’t a full platoon of policemen there. Remember that bit for later.

Let me take this moment to introduce Michael Bhatia (the link is where that chart of violence in RC-East came from). He was one of the social scientists on the HTT assigned to Colonel Schweitzer’s BCT, and Khost was one of the areas where he focused his research. His previous work was highly respected in the academic community, and despite the controversy people like Marlowe helped to fan about the program, he felt it a good idea and signed up.

Last Monday he was killed, along with two other soldiers, by an IED blast on his Humvee as he was traveling through the Sabari district of Khost. He was the first casualty in the Human Terrain System. He isn’t alone: Marlowe writes of two paratroopers killed during an IED attack in early March. And Sabari has seen a huge concentration of attacks.

But Sabari isn’t alone. Tani, one of the districts in Khost, has seen its own share of violence. While Marlowe helpfully points out that all Tani were Klahq Communists and that this explains their love of education (while still noting that communism was just another framework to pursue tribal and personal grievances), she doesn’t discuss why these incidents keep happening if the province is so damned secure. Progress is absolutely worth lauding; but she is writing as if there is no more work to be done.

She also gets things just plain old wrong. She writes of Spera district as if its mountain passes make it secure because “the enemy doesn’t want them.” Umm, what? Since when do militants hate inaccessible passes for infiltration and exfiltration? They know all the easy routes are monitored and some patrolled; they’ve been reduced to the tough ones. Spera might not have as many incidents as Sabari, but it is home to at least several infiltration and at least one exfiltration route—those the military has been willing to disclose publicly.

More curious than her tendency to simply repeat everything the Army tells her with no skepticism or independent research is Marlowe’s lack of critical thinking. After bragging about how the province is doing so well it is being handed over to the Afghan National Police, she notes that “if the rank and file are lazy and ill-trained, their superiors in the eastern region are far worse.” They are “thieves, extortionists, or rapists in uniform,” according to her. Clearly, handing them control of law enforcement in a few districts will go over well.

Also curious is her repetition of the charge that the DynCorp police trainers are lazy cowards. Now, things may have changed since last I had first-hand accounts of FOB Salerno, but no one was accusing them of being lazy and too cowardly to leave the base last year. In fact, word is they had to fight for permission to leave, and do so at least every other day. LTC Custer’s complaint about them is revealing: “They report to the Department of State, they are not under the maneuver commander’s command, so what are they doing in my battlespace? We are going to take over training of the ANP. We need to get fingerprint and retinal systems in their hands.”

Sounds like sour grapes and a turf war more than anything else. And what’s with that last bit? Even Ann Marlowe can’t find much to praise in the ANP, they’re renown for their thievery and rapistry, and yet the one thing LTC Custer thinks they need is not basic ethics, anti-corruption training, or even basic law enforcement classes, but retinal scanners? Did Khost turn into Fairfax County during the writing of this article?

I wonder if she bothered to interview any DynCorp employees to get their side of the story, or if she is just parroting whatever LTC Custer told her to say. Actually, I don’t wonder about that.

It isn’t until the very end of her article that Marlowe admits this grand experiment in social engineering is really a house built on sand. She complains the Army is too accommodating of Pashtun misogyny, despite their distaste of Pashtun “village culture” (whatever that is). She wants to change their culture to accept and value women just as we do, as if we have the right to do so: “Afghans may resist change, but our values have prestige for them. American taxpayers are funding much of Afghanistan’s development, and we have a right to tweak Afghan society in directions we consider beneficial.”

What astounding arrogance! If Ann Marlowe were really the Afghanistan expert she claims so very often to be, she would know that it is the deliberate engineering of society that has undone nearly every ruler of the country, foreign or domestic. From Amanullah Khan, one of Afghanistan’s great kings, to Naqibullah, efforts to “reform” or “improve” Afghan society have served only to unite otherwise disparate tribal and ethnic groups in opposition. Her reference to educated Pashtuns is similarly disconnected: the urban Pashtuns, those who brag about being “de-tribalized,” have very little connection to those in the countryside who fill the ranks of the Taliban groups. This is not new, either: Louis Dupree wrote extensively of the disconnect between the cosmopolitan, educated Afghans in Kabul and the other big cities and the poor, uneducated villagers in the countryside.

Simply declaring your right to engineer society because you have money is offensive in the extreme. And it is a fool’s errand: if we are so capable of forcibly changing Afghan society, why can’t we even change ours, in our own inner cities? Our record at engineering societies is a poor one.

“Culture,” Marlowe closes, is “the hardest to change.” Absolutely. Culture changes organically, it responds to external and internal stimuli at its own pace. Rapid change results in shock. The one thing Afghanistan does not need right now is yet another pervasive culture shock, as Marlowe advocates.

But then again, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s advocating most of the time. Like other propagandists, she repeats uncritically whatever the military tells her, because she likes and believes in their mission. That is fine, and leads to many half-truths being dutifully reported, but when it leads to directly contradicting her previous work—with no explanation or apology—then it it past time to take her seriously.

“It’s nice to know that when the government collapses in Kabul,” Barnett Rubin recently said, “at least Khost will still be secure.” Maybe that isn’t quite so nice.

In the face of massive protests from the new civilian government and Pakistani media, his appointment has been dropped. So maybe they aren’t as tone deaf as they pretend to be. Still, given the way Pakistani-American relations have deteriorated in recent months, his appointment soured things unnecessarily. Like it or not, the U.S. military is as much a PR agent as a war fighting organ—and they know it, if the way they treat the American public is any indication. Why they don’t think public opinion in other countries matters as well is a mystery.

This matters because Harrison, who claims expertise on South and East Asia, has written a rather surprising analysis of the concept of Pashtunistan.

Summary: The alarming growth of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Pashtun tribal region of north-western Pakistan and southern Afghanistan is usually attributed to the popularity of their messianic brand of Islam and to covert help from Pakistani intelligence agencies. But another, more ominous, reason also explains their success: their symbiotic relationship with a simmering Pashtun separatist movement that could lead to the unification of the estimated 41 million Pashtuns on both sides of the border, the break-up of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the emergence of a new national entity, an ‘Islamic Pashtunistan’.

Hrm. That alone raised some red flags. Al-Qaeda is all about creating Pashtunistan (or Pukhtunkhwa)? This warrants further exploration.

Ironically, by ignoring ethnic factors and defining the struggle with the jihadists mainly in military terms, the US is inadvertently helping al-Qaeda and the Taliban to capture the leadership of Pashtun nationalism. The central political problem facing Pakistan, largely shielded from international attention by the ‘war on terror’, is how to deal with the deep ethnic tensions between the Punjabi majority, which controls the armed forces, and Baluchi, Sindhi and Pashtun minorities that have been denied a fair share of economic and political power.

Harrison seems to be suffering under the illusion of over-generalization: the “jihadists” consist of both Pakistani and Afghani Taliban—important to distinguish because one grew in the refugee-madrassas in the FATA, and one came from the hills above Kandahar, along with all the splinter groups—local militants who fight for reasons that may include economic or political power but may not, village elders dissatisfied with Musharraf’s highly militaristic post-9/11 policies, and legitimate Islamist and Taliban-esque political parties. To summarize this as “jihadist” is to simplify to the point of meaninglessness.

Harrison does the same thing when describing Pakistan. He claims there is “no precedent” in South Asia for a state composed of “five ethno-linguistic regions” like Pakistan in 1947 or 1973, yet the man has written tens of thousands of words about India. Which, let it be stated, has slightly more than five ethno-linguistic regions. No one is talking about it failing.

The ideologues of Pakistani nationalism exalt the historical memory of Akbar and Aurangzeb as the symbols of a lost Islamic grandeur in South Asia. By contrast, for the Baluchis, Sindhis and Pashtuns, the Moghuls are remembered primarily as the symbols of past oppression.

I could be missing something critical in the local discourse, but when is the last time one of either the militants in the tribal belts, or Balochi separatists, or Sindhis like Benazir Bhutto mentioned the Moghul Empire? It is not out of line to say this is at the bottom of immediate concerns to the minorities Harrison is describing, especially if their primary grievance against those big, nasty Punjabs is economic and political power.

And since when are Pashtuns a monolithic group? It’s fair to talk of Balochis and Sindhis in group terms, as they tend to organize into hierarchical structures and align their beliefs. But Pashtuns? If there’s one thing my comparatively short time studying has taught me, it is that one generalizes Pashtuns at one’s own expense—aside from the broadest characterizations, which even then will only be right maybe a portion of the time, it is a dangerous and foolish game. So when Harrison writes that, “the Pashtuns… bitterly resent” the power of Tajiks in Afghanistan, he is glossing over what is for all practical purposes an infinite variety of Pashtun experience, belief, and ideologies.

Blaming it all on Tajiks is short-sighted, and reeks of filtering all of Afghanistan’s problems, and everyone’s problem with the central government, through the hagiography of Ahmed Shah Massoud. Rather than discussing the problems with incorporating warlords of all ethnicities—Hazara, Kuchi, Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik, and Turkmen—or the endemic problem of official corruption and the opium trade, or the poor security along the border regions, Harrison blames it all on those damned Tajiks. Classy.

I’m honestly curious what he bases that on, since nothing here is footnoted, he refers to no interviews or source texts, and it is written as an intuitively obvious assertion. It is not. Harrison needs to argue his case, not state it. When he claims, for example, that Pashtuns blame all their woes on the British, he is forgetting a few centuries of intervening history that also factor into their grievances—including, let us not forget, the willful destruction of most of the country during the Soviet invasion.

While it is true that the issue of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is disputed, it is not as black-and-white as Harrison claims, nor is it as simple as the Pashtuns being denied something that is rightfully theirs. Digging into the relevant histories of the region (see here and here) can see the historical roots of the dispute over Pashtun lands is much more than the British simply claiming Pashtun land between the Indus and the Khyber. Similarly, discussing only Pakistan’s recent attempts to mute the Pashtunistan movement ignores over a century of history of violence cycles and grievance resolution in the region.

Despite Harrison’s decades of writing about Afghanistan, I honestly have to question just how much he knows of the culture if he writes things like this:

There are from two to three dozen Pushtun tribes, depending on how one classifies them, generally divided into four major groupings: the Durranis and Ghilzais, concentrated in Afghanistan; the so-called independent tribes, straddling the Durand Line; and several tribes, such as the Khattaks and Bannuchis, centred on the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan.

I’ve never heard the number of tribes listed as that low, unless he is only counting above an arbitrary cut-off point. The problem is that Pashtuns tend to self-identify according to a variety of identity layers—what most modern western analysts call Supertribe, tribe, clan, division, and so on. The layer at which one is self-identifying is very fluid, and often situationally dependent; therefore, any data on what kind of identity a given person is using—especially during ethnographic surveys—must be viewed with skepticism. Harrison allows for no such diversity in his simplistic characterization of Pashtun society, which is vastly more fractured than he gives it credit for. (Conspicuously missing from Harrison’s account is the revelation that almost all Afghan-on-Afghan violence in the country, and especially in RC-East where the Pashtunistan concept has most sway, is between warring factions of Pashtun tribes.)

But Harrison’s misreading of Afghanistan’s history and culture goes deeper:

By contrast, the loss of the trans-Durand territories in 1823 and the consequent division of the Pashtuns left a truncated Afghanistan with a more tenuous ethnic balance. As the ‘great game’ between Britain and Russia developed during the 19th century, the British egged on successive Afghan rulers, who gradually pushed the border of Afghanistan northwards to the Oxus River. The British goal was to make Afghanistan a buffer state, and the Pashtun rulers in Kabul had imperialist ambitions of their own. Extensive areas populated by Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and other non-Pashtun ethnic groups were annexed by Kabul after long and costly struggles that left a legacy of built-in ethnic conflict.

This is, simply, twisted. The “subsequent divisions” of the Pashtuns (which, again, were absolutely not as united as Harrison makes them out to have been) had everything to do with their relationship with the Sikhs and the widespread feuding amongst the Sardars, and barely anything (if at all) to do with the British. Here, he portrays the noble Pashtuns are empty pawns doing the bidding of the British, apparently forgetting the context of two extremely bloody wars between the Afghans and the Brits.

Indeed, absolving the Pashtuns of any hand in their own fate is infantilizing them—surely a worse crime than their current status of semi-autonomy in two states.

The rest of Harrison’s history would require a tremendous amount of effort to untangle; suffice it to say that he glosses over many significant events and choices the Pashtuns made collectively, whitewashes their own role in their fate, and blames everything on those meddlesome British. What is more interesting than his tenuous grasp of history (based on which texts I couldn’t say, as it doesn’t match with any of the major works I’ve read) is his treatment of the area post-9/11.

Here, Pakistan is a limp puppet, doing the bidding of Washington. While this is true to a certain extent—Islamabad would not be in conflict with the tribal areas at this exact moment if not for American prodding—it, again, greatly over-simplifies the history of the region, which indicates that the tribes there were headed for conflict anyway (in other words, another cycle of violence, accommodation, and cease-fire would begin). Blaming it all on Washington’s Pakistan puppets absolves Pervez Musharraf of his culpability in his ludicrously violent overreactions in the early days of the wars in FATA, and places an out-sized level of blame on Washington. But what is this?

The radicalisation of the Pashtun areas straddling the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has intensified both Islamist zealotry and Pashtun nationalism. In the conventional wisdom, one or the other, either Islamist or Pashtun identity, will eventually triumph, but an equally plausible possibility is that the result could be what Hussain Haqqani has called an ‘Islamic Pashtunistan’.

Maybe my searching skills are off, but all I could find of this reference were other articles written by Harrison himself, quoting Hussain and calling the Pashtuns “a time bomb,” and other silly, over-hyped nonsense. Perhaps if he footnoted his quotes, or indicated where he got any of this information, we could check it and see for ourselves.

As it is, Harrison casts a very unconvincing shadow on the discourse over the Pashtunistan issue. It merits serious discussion—separatist movements always do. But placing them in their proper context, both historically and socially, is just as important as making a case you’ve been trying to make for years. As it is, Harrison seems to rely on mischaracterization, hyperbole, and “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (to borrow a phrase and avoid slinging charges of Orientalism)—hardly the stuff of a world-renowned regional expert. I hesitate to accuse Harrison of wearing ideological blinders, as I can’t really figure out what his ideology is, simultaneously blaming the West for subjugating the Pashtuns while granting them unlimited power to unite, declare independence, and bring down that very same West.

But that’s par for the course for most writing these days on Pashtuns, and even on Afghanistan. It just doesn’t add up. My question here, though, is the same as it was for Ann Marlowe: who the hell keeps paying him to write? I have to assume it is simply the ignorant, those more aware of his reputation than his recent scholarship, without the means to fact-check what he writes so long as it confirms their biases. That is a major loss to the field, that rigor. But, as with the curious longevity of Thomas Johnson (whom, ironically enough, Marlowe has called “brilliant”), it doesn’t seem to be that unoriginal, either.

I never focused on the cellphone story because it was so clearly a bluff—the Taliban would see its own operations seriously curtailed if a significant number of cell towers were destroyed. So they would just take down one or two here and there, creating just enough of a ruckus to gain a great deal of attention and create enough fuss without putting in danger the very same infrastructure on which they rely. Meanwhile, the threat of blowing up a tower serves as a handy extortion tool as opium prices drop.

Now we see a second-order effect: the locals got pissed at the insurgents for going too far. This is inevitable as the Taliban, just like NATO, searches for its “happy center” where the ops tempo accomplishes the mission without jeopardizing it.

Why bring up Barnett? He linked glowingly to this piece, explaining it is, “about as emblematic as you can get in this war of Connectors v. Disconnectors.”

This doesn’t make any sense—rather than “this war” (I don’t think he was limiting it to Afghanistan) being between blood thirsty Orcs who hate telephones and noble Inmarsat users with lilly-white skin, it is a war of ideologies with an asymmetric use of technology. Frankly, seeing the Taliban groups hesitate to demolish either most of Afghanistan’s cell network, which is easily within their capability given the numbers of bombs they plant, or even a regionally-limited node, which is possible given the high centrality of Afghan’s communications networks, is a much more interesting story. The key piece missing here is that the Taliban are as reliant on those cell towers as civilians are, and destroying them all would be deeply counterproductive.

I tried to leave this point as a comment on Barnett’s blog earlier this morning. I didn’t even link back here to hype Registan.net. But, as with many other attempts to engage him in a skeptical discussion of his theories of endless war, it was never approved by his moderator (or Barnett himself).

Update: Barnett’s assistant/associate/whatever acknowledged that I disagreed with him. He reduces this post to a plea to be taken seriously and a deep confusion of tactics vs. strategy. I’ll let readers here decide what it really is. I have no desire for him or his associates to take me or this blog seriously, however—rather, I take pride in being mocked by his ilk: I don’t have any pet theories to defend against, you know, reality.

For a look at how both of Barnett’s books demonstrate an appalling ignorance of the world he wants to reduce to a sentence or two, see here and here. And let’s not forget his mad scheme to annex Cuba.

JALALABAD, Afghanistan — The most interesting discovery during a visit to this city where Osama bin Laden planted his flag in 1996 is that al-Qaeda seems to have all but disappeared. The group is on the run, too, in Iraq, and that raises some interesting questions about how to pursue this terrorist enemy.

“Al-Qaeda is not a topic of conversation here,” says Col. Mark Johnstone, the deputy commander of Task Force Bayonet, which oversees four provinces surrounding Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Pete Benchoff agrees: “We’re not seeing a lot of al-Qaeda fighters. They’ve shifted here to facilitation and support.”

Well duh. Actually, Ignatius is being disingenuous here: Osama bin Laden picked up shop, not “planted his flag,” in Jalalabad in 1996 and moved to Kandahar. Then after the U.S. invaded to Khost, then FATA, probably Waziristan. What does that have to do with anything? And it is rare that anyone anywhere in the country actually talks about fighting “al Qaeda”—they’re fighting various Taliban and other militia groups. Just like in Iraq, where the Defense Intelligence Agency says “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” had its maximum reach at 15% of the insurgency. There is far more to Afghanistan than al Qaeda, and to pretend the presence of foot soldiers means anything is folly.

Ignatius eventually contradicts himself by getting the facts of the insurgency mostly-sort-of-right, but then makes an even weirder point:

These anti-terrorist operations require special skills — but they shouldn’t require a big, semi-permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan. Local security forces can handle a growing share of responsibility — perhaps ineptly, as in Basra a few weeks ago or in Kabul last weekend, but that’s their problem.

Second, the essential mission in combating al-Qaeda now is to adopt in Pakistan the tactics that are working in Iraq and Afghanistan. This means alliances with tribal warlords to bring economic development to the isolated mountain valleys of the FATA region in exchange for their help in security. And it means joint operations involving U.S. and Pakistani special forces to chase al-Qaeda militants as they retreat deeper into the mountains.

What? Events like the attack on Karzai last week are not only “their” problem, it is our, and it will remain so as long as we are the security guarantor of the Karzai regime. So long as we run the country, which honest people will admit we do, we have to take on responsibility. And if the security forces are so riddled with infiltrators that insurgents can launch a mortar attack in the capital on the most securitized day of the year, then the problems are not just theirs, but ours.

And who is saying we need to go invade Pakistan and replicate Anbar? Well, besides Barrack Obama and an untrustworthy smattering of flappy-jawed policy wonks who don’t know jack about the region? Barnett Rubin is right—the man lives in la la land. Which is probably why I almost never read him.

Remember that DOD-approved strategic communications plan for Afghanistan? I’d say it’s working if they are engineering this kind of coverage, no matter how ham-fisted it appears to be.

While Abkhaz officials claim they are just defending their sovereign territory, Georgian officials are claiming Russia is trying to bait them into a war. It is a very serious charge: shooting down aircraft is an act of war.

But the big stumbling block here is the timing. This is right as Dmitri “the bear” Medvedev is taking the reigns of Russia gingerly handed off by Vladimir Putin. Much like Putin’s campaign in Chechnya, which was meant to demonstrate his strength and power as much as “solving” the separatist movement (though mass killings do the trick too), this smacks of Russia creating a spectacle just to prove that it can.

Like it or not on their end, Abkhazia is utterly reliant on Moscow for direction, funding, and support. Now that Russia has significantly increased its military presence in the region, there is even more reason to assume they chose right now because of Russia’s concerns, and not their own (they could have been shooting down drones at any time).

So even if this is not some sabre-rattling by a new President keenly aware of his initial public image, it looks like it is. So it might as well be, considering the superiority of perception over reality in the public. And that’s a dangerous situation that can quickly spiral out of control.

… Karimov has appointed a Supervisory Council to manage the mine. Its members will serve one-year terms.

Preparations for the Presidential take-over began in April when a special resolution of the cabinet proclaimed the Uzbek government the owner of the mining colossus. The resolution, entitled, “On the Charter of the State Enterprise Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Works”, became law when signed by President Karimov at the end of April.

Information in the report suggests that Karimov began preparing the way for this move since January, placing this part and parcel in Karimov’s post-election power consolidation moves which themselves are probably a preparation for, well, something or other. I would say an eventual transition to a new president, but it’s far from clear that someone is eagerly waiting in the wings for Karimov’s job.

What makes this move particularly interesting and kind of an outlier from the string of removals from office is that Navoi is kind of a region apart in Uzbekistan. I can’t recall citations off the top of my head, but I’ve read articles noting it as having a very different relationship with Tashkent than any other regions. And that is certainly because NGMK is Navoi. The company generates quite a bit of money and, at least when I lived there, NGMK owned everything in Navoi worth owning. Also during my time in Navoi, I found that NGMK had a lot more power than the local government. It took a while to figure out, but once we eventually learned that NGMK had the ability to get things done at incredible speed. Most of the reason why, from what I’ve been told, is that the central government mostly kept its distance so as not to screw up a very large, fairly well-run business venture.

The takeover is significant for at least one reason. It is a reminder that in spite of a handful of well-publicized gestures designed to give the appearance that Islom Karimov is willing to let the pendulum slowly swing back toward reform, the executive has very much been consolidating power since the latest presidential election. I think it is debatable whether or not a tighter grip on elite politics really means that opportunities will further narrow for civil society. (It’s not as if elites have wanted open space for political debate even if they oppose Karimov.) But, it is worth keeping in mind that the subsurface trend in Uzbek politics is one of executive consolidation of power, likely, were I to wager, in preparation for an eventual hand-off of the presidency.

Oh look, there’s Bill Roggio arguing with Pakistanis about the issues facing the tribal areas. It is interesting to hear Jalil Afridi, the editor of the Frontier Post, lend his perspective. He cops to being a “tribal,” meaning a member of the Afridi tribe, one of the few Pashtun tribes not split in some way by the Durand Line. They are also, in a totally unrelated tidbit, renown arms dealers—the largest of which is featured in this amusingly amateurish video on VBS, hosted by a man named Naeem Afridi… of the exact same tribe. Mr. Afridi (the editor, mind you) sees the main problem facing the FATA’s relationship with the outside world to be the century-old Frontier Crime Regulation law, which governed the area’s relationship with British India and later influenced its turbulent history with Islamabad (see my thoughts on this matter here, which contains many of the same points raised by Mr. Afridi and Mr. Nawaz).

The regional history is very important. So important, in fact, that I think Roggio is discounting it needlessly as Afridi hypes it too much—the traditional relationship between tribes and the central power is a relatively unchanging thing, and has been for a long time. This is a perfect segue into discussing a paper written by Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason of the Naval Post Graduate School, written for the journal International Security: “No Sign Until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier.”

Unfortunately, discussing the work of Johnson is a difficult task: much of it amounts to literature reviews, which are not in and of themselves crimes, but the lack of analysis reduces discussion to focusing on how he frames events, histories, and authors—which is a vastly more complicated. Nevertheless, there are some broad points to make that bring this paper up disappointingly short, and ways it could have been so much more useful. (My research into this matter makes me something of a biased observer, but the points I raise should still be valid. I hope.)

On a macro level, this paper is riddled with clichés. From the weird prevalence of intelligence analyst lingo in describing the general “tribal temperament” of various tribal groups and ethnicities—this one supports the Taliban, these people are peaceful and would never harm a lamb—to the curiously racist notion that there is something rooted in the idea of Pashtunness that makes them particularly susceptible to religious demagogues, there is no escaping Johnson and Mason’s relentless romanticism of the people of the region. Warfare is “savage,” Pashtun bloodlust makes them “the perfect insurgents,” the Balochi are “testy but not insurgent,” the Waziri are “irascible,” and the Uighurs are “restive” and violent relics of ancient Kashgaria. Are these guys trying to be Robert Kaplan or what? This doesn’t touch the adjective-laden descriptions of the region’s geography that sound, for all the world, like they were cribbed directly from Louis Dupree.

Furthermore, there are some rather glaring factual errors. On page 44 (the report starts on page 41) there is a footnote about the Kuchi nomads. Johnson and Mason claim they have seventeen seats set aside for them in the Wolesi Jirga; there are really only ten. They claim the Kuchi “dislike the Taliban intensely,” except that the Kuchi were early supporters of the Taliban and later rather brutal foot soliders during the long brutalization of the Hazarajat. To this day, there are simmering tensions between Hazara settlers and brutal campaigns of forced eviction by the Kuchi, many of whom are said to remain loyal to the Taliban’s goals. While this is most likely rooted in a more traditional nomad-settler dispute common to interface areas, rather than some deep-seated ideological affiliation with the Taliban, the authors don’t allow for this depth of analysis, and their simplification confuses the issue.

On page 47, the make a series of claims: a) “Nuristanis” are a single, distinct ethnic group; Hazara are Hanafi Sunnis; all the various regional minorities speak mutually unintelligible languages and can’t communicate; and only the Nuristanis demonstrate syncretic traditions within their practice of Islam. This last part is certainly true—thanks to an ancient and sheltered history, many peoples within Nuristan do maintain some animist and polytheist-like traditions (which I think makes them one of the most fascinating people on the planet), but many Pashtun groups—hell, most groups all over Central and South Asia—have incorporated pre-Islamic traditions into their religion. The Afridis, for example, still worship human figures at shrines, something explicitly forbidden in the Koran. And that big about languages is just silly; most people in the region, even the Nuristanis, speak Pashto as a lingua franca. The Nuristani are also the only “ethnic group” in the list that probably isn’t—as Richard Strand has documented, they comprise at least fifteen separate ethno-linguistic traditions, and those traditions are what are not mutually intelligible. Again: Johnson and Mason hopelessly oversimplify the situation.

One enormous snafu that leaps off the pages and should make any Afghanistan expert bristle is the assertion, on page 51, that “the best documented of the many fault lines running through Pashtun society is the 300-year old conflict between the Durrani and Ghilzai tribes in Afghanistan, a conflict that forms one of the underlying reasons for the struggle between the Taliban and the government of Hamid Karzai.” This is, flatly, wrong. The authors don’t bother to inform a non-expert which tribe is which, because the statement itself is incoherent. They reference both Steve Coll and Ahmed Rashid in other places, so the existence of this claim is puzzling: both of those authors refute the tribal argument about the Taliban… mostly because the Taliban does not focus on tribal affiliation. Hamid Karzai was supporting the Taliban in the 1990s as a stabilizing force until they murdered his father; then he turned into an opponent. There is nothing tribal about the rivalry.

But the history they tell, is that history any good? Sort of. Right off the bat, the authors make the claim that the majority of the violence and extremism in the border areas is not only caused by Pashtuns, which is well enough on its own, but that this fact “has not been fully grasped by a governmental policy community that has long down-played cultural dynamics.”

This is, in a word, wrong. I would make the argument that in Afghanistan the government (i.e the Military) tends to over-filter things through a tribal, or cultural context. There is an over-emphasis on Pashtunwali (more on this later), and an over-emphasis on tribes to the detriment of other qawm or identity layers that influence social relationships. In fact, in one of Noah Shachtman’s many overheated tirades against the Army’s Human Terrain System—which was formed to address these kinds of distorted priorities—he noted a curious success:

In western Afghanistan, the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne had come under a steady stream of attacks, despite “a very aggressive outreach effort to village elders,” the report notes. The Human Terrain Team embedded with the brigade observed that the true power brokers in the area were the mullahs — the local religious leaders.

“After redirecting their outreach effort to the mullahs,” the 4th Brigade “experienced a rapid and dramatic decrease in Taliban attacks…. In the words of the brigade commander, ‘For five years, we got nothing from the community. After meeting with the mullahs, we had no more bullets for 28 days; captured 80 Afghan-born Taliban, 10 Pakistanis, and 32 killed or captured Arabs.’”

That doesn’t sound like a community systematically ignoring cultural dynamics. Where are Johnson and Mason pulling this from? The assertion isn’t footnoted. In Husain Haqqani’s work, he notes something very much the opposite of the authors’ claim:

State Department talking points for President Nixon, prepared for [Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto’s Washington visit in July 1973, stated:

…Over the longer run, if Pakistan is internally unstable and deeply divided, the Indians, Afghans, and Soviets may be tempted to place pressures on Pakistan. In this environment, we see the resolution of Pakistan’s security problems primarily in political/psychological and economic terms and only secondarily in military terms.

In other words, going back at least to the 1970’s, the U.S. government was viewing events in Pakistan’s security sphere through a cultural, rather than a security, framework. This is backed up further by their explicit support of religious zealots during the mujahideen war, as they understood it would be easiest to draw in foreign fighters and broad support across the Muslim world by making an ordinary war of conquest for the Soviets into a holy war of God-warriors against Godless atheists. Saying the U.S. “governmental policy community” (which, to be fair, includes nearly everyone in Washington, DC, and lots more outside it) “has long downplayed cultural dynamics” in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region is more than a bit of a stretch.

Other parts of their history are problematic as well. On page 52, Johnson and Mason claim that the segmentation of Pashtun society—into concentric rings of tribal levels, family levels, and so on—have made them irreconcilable to “external rule.” After stating earlier in that very same section that the Pashtuns probably migrated to the area 1000 years ago, they list Alexander the Great, who invaded the region around 400 BCE, as one reason why the Pashtuns don’t like foreigners. They then list the British, Soviets, Afghans, and Pakistani’s as hard proof the region is ungovernable by outsiders. This of course ignores that for several decades the British, Afghans, and Pakistanis had a pretty decent run with ruling the area, just in a reduced and locally-appropriate way under terms like the FCR. But this ignores the other foreigners who have ruled the land with varying combinations of appalling brutality and clever politiking: the Mongols, Ghaznavids, Safavids, Timurids, and Mughals come immediately to mind; I’m sure there are others. Similarly, the claim that the Soviets engaged in “genocidal military tactics” is ludicrously overblown; the so-called butterfly mines were horrific, yes, as were the attempts to raze the countryside to force the rural villagers into the cities (interesting that the Soviets preferred urban counterinsurgency to rural), but these do not rise to the level of genocide. Rosanne Klass acutely describes what genocide was like, when Genghis Khan’s son was killed during the seige of Balkh:

What was lost could never be truly restored. The land had been depopulated, its people were dead, fled, or enslaved… The scholars were gone, the artists were gone, the poets, the heroes, the kings were gone, the land was stripped of life, the fields were ruined and barren. My horrors die with me, yours with you, but such horrors as these are ineffaceable, and heal, when they heal, like an amputation.

They also say a million Pashtuns were killing during the Soviet War. There is no doubt a lot of Pashtuns died; but to downplay the sacrifice of the other ethnicities in Afghanistan during the struggle against the Soviets is simply offensive. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Hazara all sacrificed nobly and in great numbers.

Later on that page, Johnson and Mason claim—without sourcing anything more than Peter Hopkirk and a brief Martin Ewans book to claim the Afghans and Pakistanis were no better at “ruling” the FATA than the British of the Soviets… a foolish claim to anyone familiar with the history.

By far the best, and most solidly constructed part of the entire paper, is the section on the Tori Khel rebellion of 1936. Of course, the authors play with chronology and mistakenly imply things that happened in 1936 (they don’t specify the year the Faqir of Ipi enters the scene) happened before other things in 1897. They do this to make the case that the Taliban is neither unique nor new to the region—a good claim to make, supposing it is referring to the modern, cellularized Taliban, and not the group that arose out of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s illiterate hillmen around Kandahar.

But this one bright paragraph is quickly overshadowed by a running series of logical inconsistencies. On page 54, Johnson and Mason claim that the ulemas, the new variant of an old tribal structure used by the Taliban, is fueling the insurgency. In the next paragraph, the say “tribalism and tribal social structure alone cannot account for this insurgent behavior.” Okay. In the next paragraph, after attacking those who say the tribal areas are “ungoverned” (thank God; this is right), they then say that this framework is used to push the central government into the tribal areas by various outsiders “who are the first to downplay the importance of tribalism and the Pashtun tribal code.” Later in the same paragraph, they say the tribal structure and social codes make a policy of establishing central government control a counterproductive exercise.

That last bit is actually correct, but it took such a convoluted journey to get there it’s a wonder anyone can pick it out of the morass.

The section on Pashtunwali is riddled with misconceptions and further inconsistencies. On page 59, one paragraph describes the tribal code as “uncompromising” and “so profoundly at odds with Western mores that its application constantly brings one up with a jolt.” A Pashtun, Johnson and Mason explain, “must adhere to this code to maintain honor.”

In the next paragraph, Pashtunwali is “intrinsically flexible and dynamic,” and has such profoundly-at-odds-with-the-West social codes as self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, forgiveness, and tolerance. They then proclaim the hill Pashtuns “the real Pashtuns” because they carry knives, and claim that all insurgencies in the area always start in the hills because of “nang culture,” which of course ignores insurgencies against the British, Soviets, and Pakistanis.

On page 60, Pashtunwali goes back to being a “critical set of obligations” imposed on society, one that all Pashtuns embrace. This entire section falls prey to what the wonderful blog Afghanistanica termed, “wonderful Rudyard Kiplingesque hyperbole” that is so common to Western writing about a social code that is about as rigid and adhered to as chivalry.

Critically missing in Johnson and Mason’s description of Pashtunwali is the obligation of one who is offered hospitality to lead raids on the land that once housed him. This, as explained in Trench’s history of the Frontier Scouts, goes much further in explaining the refuge granted al-Qaeda and the Mullah Mohammed Omar branch of the Taliban… and their insistence on leading raids about into Afghanistan.

None of this touches on sourcing issues, from relying on the CIA World Fact Book, one of the worst open sources around, to “A Military History of Afghanistan” used to describe Pathan restlessness as told to Mountstuart Elphinstone in 1809, to relying on incomplete contemporary “pop” histories of the region rather than far more developed and older texts. And this is when they can be bothered to source any of the dubious claims that pop up regularly throughout the text, which is rare and quite frustrating when one wants to know where they got the silly idea, say, that the FATA was crawling with Chechens.

***

Alas, by this point, the pitfalls of a Thomas Johnson essay on Afghanistan should be clear. Digging through it and unraveling all of the poorly sourced claims of intrigue and danger is an exhausting task, and this took me hours of reading and cross-checking claims against sources I had on hand. I’m certain I missed many, though my copy of scribbled on to high heaven. It is almost there, and gets most things sort of half right, but as always the devil is in the details. And it is in the details that this essay falls to little tiny pieces, shattering upon its own pretentiousness.

I have a much bigger question, however. International Security is a respected, peer-reviewed journal run by Harvard and MIT. Who the hell reviewed this? You don’t need to know anything about the literature to be able to spot the logical inconsistencies. But I suppose when the author in question proudly poses in a shalwar kameez, his tales of exotic and violent lands are simply not to be questioned. They need to be.

“They (Iran) interfere in a variety of different ways, perhaps not as violently as they do sometimes in Iraq,” Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, told reporters at a press conference.

“But what we see is Iranian interference politically, Iranian interference in terms of the money that they channel into the political process, Iranian interference in terms of playing off local officials against central government, trying to undermine the state in that way.”

Boucher was speaking in Paris as part of preparations for a major international donors’ conference for Afghanistan, due to take place in the French capital on June 12.

“In many ways they (Tehran) do support the work of the government, but they also work with the political opposition, they work with the local opposition,” Boucher added.

“They have funnelled some weapons to the Taliban, they seem kind of working with everybody to be hedging their bets, or just looking… like they want weakness or instability in Afghanistan more than anything else.”

Boucher told reporters that “several shipments” of weapons from Iran to the Taliban had been intercepted.

“I’m not sure they (Tehran) want to see the Taliban win, but I don’t think they want the government to establish good control either. I think they are just trying to hedge their bets and keep everything fluid.”

Clearly, the one thing Iran wants is for Afghanistan to remain unstable so refugees can stream across the border. Since when is Iran is working with the Taliban to do this? I’m afraid the days of the U.S. government making credible blanket statements is long over. Without evidence, all Boucher is saying is that Iran is meddling in Afghanistan’s politics to tweak the situation in its favor… exactly as the U.S. does.

Frankly, we should want Afghanistan and Iran to be on good terms. They are, after all, neighbors. And Iranian investment has been put to excellent use in Herat, and to a lesser extent elsewhere. Why would they also fund its destruction? Boucher’s comments are incoherent. Kind of like U.S. policy in the region.